December 2023 - LFG-list - mailman.uni-konstanz.de

REMINDER: LFG f-structure comparison meeting online Tue 21 Nov at 9am UTC (9am UK/Ireland)
by Elaine Ui Dhonnchadha 20 Mar '24

20 Mar '24

Dear all, This is a reminder of the LFG f-structure comparison meeting that will be held online on Tue 21 Nov 2023 9am - 10am UTC. >From Beginners to Experts, all are Welcome! We look forward to seeing you there. - Mary, Lawrence and Elaine Zoom Link: https://tcd-ie.zoom.us/j/93770084827?pwd=OEpZampzanZMS2VXMDNkcEJyTU9WZz09 Meeting ID: 937 7008 4827 Passcode: 111795 Please refer to the message below for the details. Thank you! --------------------------------------- As we announced in an earlier message, Chit-Fung Lam (Lawrence), Elaine Ui Dhonnchadha, and I are planning to revive the f-structure comparison sessions that were held in the regular meetings of the ParGram consortium ( https://pargram.w.uib.no/). These meetings will be held on-line, and anyone who is developing a grammar using the XLE grammar development platform (https://ling.sprachwiss.uni-konstanz.de/pages/xle/) is welcome to attend. We would also welcome participation by anyone using the Grammar Writer's Workbench ( https://parc-public.pages-external.parc.com/xle/isl/groups/nltt/medley/). In these meetings, we will discuss and compare f-structures for a parallel set of translationally equivalent sentences. We will use the Pargram treebank sentences as a starting point. The Pargram treebank is available at the following link (scroll to the end of the page): https://clarino.uib.no/iness/treebanks?collection=ParGram&reset-all=true We will discuss the f-structures for the following sentences (we may not have time for a discussion of all of them -- it is fine to attend the meeting even if your grammar does not parse all of these): The driver starts the tractor. The tractor is red. What did the farmer see? Did the farmer sell his tractor? Push the button. All participants will translate these sentences into the language they are working on, and produce and print out the f-structures to PDF. There is no need to print out c-structures. We have created a Google Drive directory for the f-structures, which currently contains f-structures for English, Irish, Polish and Mandarin. In advance of the meeting, meeting participants should plan to deposit their f-structures there for as many of the sentences as you can parse. Please contact one of us if you would like to have access to this repository. Please try to model your f-structures on the analyses in the treebank to the extent possible. In the Pargram consortium, the idea is that differences in f-structures for translational equivalents should reflect syntactic differences between the languages -- there should be no arbitrary differences to do with spelling of feature names or other linguistically irrelevant details. If you have any questions, or if you would like to be added to the list of people with access to the f-structure repository, please send email to one of us. We are looking forward to discussing your f-structures! - Mary, Lawrence and Elaine

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LFG Bulletin, December 2023
by Agnieszka Patejuk 31 Dec '23

31 Dec '23

December 2023 ** Please send bulletin items to me by email ** ** < LFG.bulletin "at" gmail "dot" com >** Next issue: March 2024 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CONTENTS 1. LFG Handbook published! 2. LFG23 Proceedings available! 3. Drafts for comments 4. Recent LFG work 5. Online resources 6. Boilerplate ------------------------------------------------------------------------ * ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. LFG Handbook published! The LFG Handbook has been published, it is available open source from Language Science Press: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/312 This monumental publication edited by Mary Dalrymple consists of over 40 chapters, grouped into 4 parts, covering a wide range of topics. Synopsis: "Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a nontransformational theory of linguistic structure, first developed in the 1970s by Joan Bresnan and Ronald M. Kaplan, which assumes that language is best described and modeled by parallel structures representing different facets of linguistic organization and information, related by means of functional correspondences. This volume has five parts. Part I, Overview and Introduction, provides an introduction to core syntactic concepts and representations. Part II, Grammatical Phenomena, reviews LFG work on a range of grammatical phenomena or constructions. Part III, Grammatical modules and interfaces, provides an overview of LFG work on semantics, argument structure, prosody, information structure, and morphology. Part IV, Linguistic disciplines, reviews LFG work in the disciplines of historical linguistics, learnability, psycholinguistics, and second language learning. Part V, Formal and computational issues and applications, provides an overview of computational and formal properties of the theory, implementations, and computational work on parsing, translation, grammar induction, and treebanks. Part VI, Language families and regions, reviews LFG work on languages spoken in particular geographical areas or in particular language families. The final section, Comparing LFG with other linguistic theories, discusses LFG work in relation to other theoretical approaches." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 2. LFG23 Proceedings available! The Proceedings of the 2023 Lexical Functional Grammar Conference have been published: https://lfg-proceedings.org/lfg/index.php/main/issue/current ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 3. Drafts for comments 'Drafts for comments' offers bulletin readers the opportunity to submit information about drafts or projects on which they would like to receive comments from the community. This brings work in progress to the attention of the community and plays some of the role that previous incarnations of the archive played. Please submit basic article/project information and (a) a URL if the item is available online or else (b) your contact email. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 4. Recent LFG work Send details of your recent work to < LFG.bulletin "at" gmail "dot" com > 4.1 Publications Dalrymple, Mary and Ida Toivonen (2023). 'Word classes in Lexical Functional Grammar.' In Eva van Lier (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Word Classes. Oxford University Press. 281–302. [ https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198852889.013.52] Findlay, Jamie Y. (2023). 'Lexical Functional Grammar as a Construction Grammar'. Journal of Language Modelling, 11:2. 197–266. [ https://doi.org/10.15398/jlm.v11i2.338] Öztürk, Seda (2023). 'Is Instrumental Causee Available in Azerbaijani?'. Proceedings of the Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic 8. 201–210. [https://doi.org/10.3765/ha0k9e13] 4.2 PhD/Masters Lam, Chit-Fung (2023). 'Control and Complementation in Parallel Constraint-Based Architecture: An Empirically Oriented Investigation of Mandarin Chinese'. PhD Thesis, University of Manchester. [ https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/control-and-complementat… ] 4.3 Conference Proceedings LFG conference papers are available electronically at: https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/lfg/ (2022-) http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/LFG/ (1996-2021) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 5. Online resources LFG website: https://ling.sprachwiss.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/lfg/ International Lexical Functional Grammar Association: https://ling.sprachwiss.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/lfg/ilfga/index.html More about LFG: http://www.sas.rochester.edu/lin/sites/asudeh/LFG/more.txt Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/lfgpage ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 6. Boilerplate The boilerplate (standard text) which previously appeared at the end of every bulletin can be accessed at: http://www.sas.rochester.edu/lin/sites/asudeh/LFG/more.txt The LFG website also serves much of the same function as the boilerplate section.

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VACANCY: Associate Professor (or Professor) of Syntax and Semantics
by Lj Mycock 20 Dec '23

20 Dec '23

The Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics and Magdalen College, Oxford are seeking to appoint an Associate Professor (or Professor) of Syntax and Semantics. Applications are welcomed from well qualified candidates with interests in Syntax and Semantics, or the Syntax-Semantics interface, in any theoretical tradition or traditions. The closing date for applications is noon on Tuesday, 23 January 2024. For full details of the post and the application process, please see: https://my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecruit/erq_jobspec_details_form.jobspec?p_id=…

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Call for papers: Usage-based approaches to syntax and semantics
by Wechsler, Stephen M 16 Dec '23

16 Dec '23

Call for Papers: Usage-based approaches to syntax and semantics Section 16 of the 21st International Congress of Linguists (ICL) Convenor: Stephen Wechsler (the University of Texas; wechsler(a)austin.utexas.edu) The 21st ICL will be held September 8 to 14, 2024 in Poznań, Poland. https://icl2024poznan.pl/<https://icl2024poznan.pl/?id=2> We invite abstract submissions for presentations or posters related to any and all usage-based approaches to explaining syntactic and semantic systems. Usage based explanations work by considering ‘the effect that usage might have on (a speaker’s) representation’ of their language (Bybee 2006:712), where usage data in the speaker’s input includes the frequency of words, constructions, collocations, and their meanings (Hopper and Bybee 2001, Goldberg 2019). Various approaches have been explored in recent years. Usage-based explanations for a feature of grammar typically involve positing a mechanism for the feature’s emergence. One common type of mechanism is iterated learning, in which inductive biases become magnified through repetition as they are passed from generation to generation (Kirby et al 2015; Briscoe 2002). There are different ideas about the nature and source of the biases, and how they may influence grammar development. Biases related to information theoretic efficiency have been proposed as the basis for explanations of word order (Hahn et al 2018; Culbertson et al 2020), the typology of word meaning (overview in Kemp et al 2018), the semantics of quantifiers (Carcassi et al 2021), compositionality, syntax-phonology interface and morphologization (Bresnan 2021), and other grammatical features (see Gibson et al 2019 for a general overview). In game-theoretic approaches, stable communicative strategies are predicted to develop over time as a result of emergent solutions to signaling games (Lewis 2008, Jäger 2007; Deo 2015). At a more general level these approaches often seek to explain grammar by considering its cultural evolution (Croft 2000, among others). Submissions related to any of the above, or indeed alternatives to the work described above, are welcome. Deadline for abstract submission: January 8, 2024. Abstract guidelines and submission details can be found at: https://icl2024poznan.pl/?id=2 (Abstracts should be anonymized and should contain the title, five keywords, and a text between 300 and 400 words, including examples but excluding references). References Bresnan, Joan 2021. Formal grammar, usage probabilities, and auxiliary contraction. Language, 97.1: 108-150. Briscoe, Ted, ed. 2002. Language evolution through language acquisition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bybee, Joan 2006. From Usage to Grammar: The Mind's Response to Repetition. Language, 82(4): 711-733. Carcassi, F., Steinert-Threlkeld, S. and Szymanik, J. 2021. Monotone Quantifiers Emerge via Iterated Learning. Cognitive Science, 45: e13027. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13027 Croft, William 2000. Explaining language change: an evolutionary approach. Essex: Pearson. Culbertson, Jennifer, Marieke Schouwstra, Simon Kirby 2020. From the world to word order: Deriving biases in noun phrase order from statistical properties of the world. Language 96(3): 1-22. Deo, Ashwini. 2015. The semantic and pragmatic underpinnings of grammaticalization paths: The progressive to imperfective shift. Semantics and Pragmatics 8(14): 1–52. Gibson, Edward, Richard Futrell, Steven P. Piantadosi, Isabelle Dautriche, Kyle Mahowald, Leon Bergen, and Roger Levy 2019. How Efficiency Shapes Human Language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(5): 389-407. Goldberg, Adele 2019. Explain me this: Creativity, competition, and the partial productivity of constructions. Princeton University Press. Hahn, Michael, Judith Degen, Noah Goodman, Dan Jurafsky, and Richard Futrell 2018. An Information-Theoretic Explanation of Adjective Ordering Preferences. Proceedings of CogSci 2018, pp. 1766-1771. Hopper, Paul and Joan Bybee 2001. Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Jäger, Gerhard. 2007. Evolutionary game theory and typology: A case study. Language 83(1): 74– 109. Kemp, Charles, Yang Xu, and Terry Regier 2018. Semantic Typology and Efficient Communication. Annual Review of Linguistics 4: 109–28. Kirby, Simon, Monica Tamariz, Hannah Cornish, and Kenny Smith 2015. Compression and communication in the cultural evolution of linguistic structure. Cognition 141: 87–102. Lewis, David. 1969. Convention: A philosophical study. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Stephen Wechsler Department of Linguistics The University of Texas https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/linguistics/faculty/wechsler

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Request for items: LFG Bulletin, December 2023
by Agnieszka Patejuk 11 Dec '23

11 Dec '23

Dear all, I am now putting together the LFG Bulletin for December 2023. Please take this opportunity to keep the rest of the LFG community up to date with news, details of recent publications and drafts for comments, and anything else that may be of interest. News of recent dissertations and theses is, as always, very welcome. Please send items to: <LFG.bulletin "at" gmail "dot" com> on or before **27th December 2023**. Best wishes, Agnieszka

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ParGram f-structure comparison meeting (19 Dec, UTC 9-11 am)
by Chit Fung LAM (Lawrence) 01 Dec '23

01 Dec '23

Dear LFGers and ParGram contributors, We have recently held our first f-structure comparison session, which was part of the regular meetings of the ParGram consortium ( https://pargram.w.uib.no/). A big thank you to those who attended and contributed to the discussion! We will continue to hold these meetings online. Anyone who is developing a grammar using the XLE grammar development platform ( https://ling.sprachwiss.uni-konstanz.de/pages/xle/) is welcome to attend. We would also welcome participation by anyone using the Grammar Writer's Workbench ( https://parc-public.pages-external.parc.com/xle/isl/groups/nltt/medley/). The second meeting is scheduled for *19 Dec 2023 (UTC 9-11 am)*. It will continue our discussion of the sentences in ParGram Treebanks (sentences 1, 2 and possibly 3). Those who could not attend the first meeting are also welcome to join us on 19 Dec. 1. The driver starts the tractor. 2. The tractor is red. 3. What did the farmer see? *Zoom Link*: https://tcd-ie.zoom.us/j/93770084827?pwd=OEpZampzanZMS2VXMDNkcEJyTU9WZz09 *Meeting ID*: 937 7008 4827 *Passcode*: 111795 Similar to the first meeting, all participants will translate these sentences into the language they are working on, and produce and print out the f-structures to PDF. There is no need to print out c-structures. We have created a Google Drive directory for the f-structures, which currently contains f-structures parsed by English, Norwegian, Polish, Irish, Mandarin, and Welsh grammars. In advance of the meeting, participants should plan to deposit their f-structures for the sentences there. Please contact one of us if you would like to have access to this repository. Please try to model your f-structures on the analyses in the treebank to the extent possible. In the ParGram consortium, the idea is that differences in f-structures for translational equivalents should reflect syntactic differences between the languages -- there should be no arbitrary differences to do with spelling of feature names or other linguistically irrelevant details. If you have any questions, or if you would like to be added to the list of people with access to the f-structure repository, please send an email to one of us. We are looking forward to discussing your f-structures! - Mary Dalrymple, Lawrence (Chit-Fung) Lam, and Elaine Ui Dhonnchadha

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LFG-list December 2023